Welcome to Pushback. I'm Erin Mate. The New York Post recently published a series of articles

based on a trove of leaked emails purportedly from the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden.

These emails appear to show more evidence of Hunter Biden,

cashing in on his proximity to his father, Joe Biden,

while Joe Biden was vice president.

But the reaction to the story from the post-media colleagues

was quite different than normal.

Instead of reporting on the story and evaluating the emails on their merits, news media outlets

and former intelligence officials immediately declared them as disinformation.

Twitter and Facebook even prevented people from sharing the New York Post articles

on their platforms. And then came a round of declarations that the emails were in fact the

product of Russia.

And to me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work.

The Russians have analyzed the target.

They understand that the president and his enablers

crave dirt on Vice President Biden,

whether it's real or contrived, it doesn't matter to them.

And so all of a sudden, two and a half weeks before the election, this laptop appears somehow.

We're in a much different situation now because we now know that Russian disinformation

or foreign disinformation or even campaign disinformation period is as dangerous to our democracy as anything exposed in these emails.

This particular smear, though, has also been acknowledged to come from the Kremlin.

And there it is in the Oval Office, another wonderful propaganda coup for Vladimir Putin,

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